Nufront (新岸线) is a high tech company based in Beijing, dedicated to wireless broadband communication and broadcast, IC design, video search and digital imaging technologies.

Nufront showed off their “low-power high performance” mini-PC based on their new NuSmart 2816 chipset at ARM Techcon 2010. NuSmart 2816 is based on a dual-core Cortex-A9 @ 2GHz with Mali-400 GPU. They plan to sell the chip for around 30 USD and expect ARM-based mini-PC to sell for around 200 USD retail. You can download NuSmart 2816 Product Brief for further details.

As you can see from the diagram below, NS2816 can support all features (Ethernet, Wifi, GPS, USB, I2S Audio, SATA II, MMC/SD support, VGA, HDMI or LCD video output) that are now expected in modern desktops or laptops.

Typical Board Architecture around NuSmart 2816

Video playback currently uses around 2 Watts (chip samples) and they target 1.5 Watt for video playback in the final release of their chipset which should provide a pretty decent battery life on laptops and/or netbooks.

Their mini-PC sample can run Android 2.2 and Ubuntu without or without network support (multi-boot). They also plan to port Chrome OS to their platform.

Android 2.2 interface runs pretty smoothly and they also played Quake III arena with a good FPS.

Going forward, Nufront is currently designing a Quad-core Chip to further improve performance that will be available in Q1/Q2 2011.